


Little Slice of the Stars

by coconutcluster



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: FLUFF!!, Lo and Pat are mentioned, M/M, kinda brief bc its a drabble that got out of hand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 08:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18091214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coconutcluster/pseuds/coconutcluster
Summary: Roman, after Thomas finally escaped the dreaded emo phase in his late teens, completely redecorated his room; he added curtains, rugs, a new desk, all sorts of things that helped him form the image he had of a golden prince, a piece of a castle, nestled right in Thomas's mind - most notable of his additions, however, was a string of fairy lights. They were small stars that twinkled around his ceiling and lit his room a sweet gold, and they were by far his favorite addition to the room.Until tonight.





	Little Slice of the Stars

When Roman redecorated his room after Thomas finally escaped his teenage emo phase (oh, the emo phase), he added many things he’d seen online and conjured - theoretically, of course, because contrary to Logan’s beliefs, he  _did_ plan things out before acting quite often. He crafted a new desk with leaves carved into the corners and legs; he hand-sewed shimmering curtains that shifted from a fiery, golden orange to a deep red, depending on where you stood in the room; he added gold trim near the ceilings, a fluffy white rug by his bedside that made getting up in the morning just a bit more pleasant, and, most notably, a string of fairy lights. 

They were rather pretty, in his opinion (though everything in his room was pleasing to the eye). Little stars strung together in a line, dripping soft light across his cream-colored walls and shading his furniture in gold as they twinkled throughout the night; he was no space aficionado like Logan, but he had his own slice of the stars, and he was perfectly content with it.  

Except for now, that is.

It didn’t particularly help that he’d been up for hours by the time the clock on his desk struck a mocking tone, signalling three o’clock in the morning and a monotonous ticking that seemed to say “Why aren’t you asleep yet, you fool? Do you  _want_ to look like a sloth with seasonal depression? Or perhaps, say, a raccoon, is that it? A sad, tired, idea-dry, burnt-out raccoon with a penchant for being not only an impotent moron, but also a colossal idiot?” 

Perhaps he was projecting a bit. Whatever.

Nonetheless, it was the constant, albeit subtle, flickering of his fairy lights that drove his tired mind over the edge. They brightened and waned and brightened again in a mind-numbing cycle; Roman’s eyes, no doubt bloodshot, drifted to them over and over again as he struggled to force his thoughts back to his work, the stacks of unusable video ideas sitting in precarious towers all over his desk, but he couldn’t focus on either, so everything just seemed to blur together before him, and the only thing that pierced his haze was that  _godforsaken flickering_ -

“Nope.” Roman braced his hands on the edge of the desk and pushed off, spinning aimlessly across the polished wooden floor in his chair. “No,” he said into the nothingness of his room, “nah, nuh-uh, no thank you, not today, Satan.” He was done and very annoyed with all of this, and he was taking a break. 

(He wasn’t sure what exactly ‘all of this’ pertained to, but whatever it was, he was not having it.) 

And so he stood up, rolled his shoulders, and shuffled to his door, snapping a pair of fluffy slippers onto his feet as he stepped into the darkened hallway outside his room and began his descent to the kitchen. The house was quiet; he was usually the one who changed that, but it was also three a.m. and he did  _not_ want a repeat of his last late night excursion (who knew Logan could throw things with such accuracy? Had it not been a letter opener and aimed at his head, Roman would have been impressed), so he just took a deep breath and inhaled the silence like oxygen. It was admittedly very calming. There was a soft buzz to the air, like the quiet was trying to make itself known, establish itself in the space it currently inhabited, a fair contender for the attention of whoever came across it. Roman quite liked it, actually - a different kind of music to his ears. Maybe he should be quiet more often…?

Nah.

He hopped over the last of the steps and glanced around the living room, taking in the darkness-draped furniture before weaving around it. Flipping the lights on in the kitchen, he shuffled to the fridge, examining its sparse contents with a disconcerted and rightfully disappointed frown. All they had was a thimble’s worth of milk ( _thank you, Virgil_ , he thought bitterly), half a jug of apple juice Patton reserved for breakfast, and a single water bottle labelled “LOGAN’S - ANY TAMPERING WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE TERMINATION” on a neatly printed, taped-on index card.

Well, he supposed he could always run out and get more apple juice before Patton noticed.

He grabbed a cup from the cabinet and swiped the jug of juice from the fridge, fully prepared to indulge in some apple-y goodness, which he imagined tasted even better when you were sleep deprived and desperate for any other stimulation than flickering fairy lights, when he noticed movement outside the window. 

In an instant, he was on guard, fingers curled around his still-materializing katana (the fact that he was still dressed in a plain white shirt and pajama pants with shiny crowns all over was both irrelevant and inconsequential) as he shifted the blinds a smidgen more to inspect the figure on the sidewalk in detail. With some very heroic and brave-looking squinting, he could just make out messy hair, elbows stuck out, like the figure’s hands were in their pockets, and a mysterious and suspicious lump of fabric that looked somewhat akin to a hood-

Oh, Virgil. It was Virgil. 

Roman tossed his katana aside and let it dissipate into the air as he went to the door, poking his head out before stepping onto the porch. He watched Virgil kick a pebble down the sidewalk for a second in silence. 

“Virge?” he said finally; that rock was really getting beaten up, and it was kind of his thing to save damsels in distress. Pebble in distress? 

He regretted opening his mouth (there’s a first time for everything, right? That phrase would be fantastically relevant to this situation, except for the fact that Roman actually regretted just about everything that came out of his mouth as soon as it came out of his mouth, but wow, what a possibility for apropos idioms) as Virgil nearly jumped out of his skin, eyes wide and shoulders tense as he whipped around to face what he probably thought was a murderer or ghoul in the shadows. Roman put his hands in the air and put what he hoped was a reassuring smile on his face until the anxious side’s posture relaxed again. 

“What are you doing out here?” Virgil called down the sidewalk, voice oddly soft and shaky with the hush of the neighborhood. 

“I was getting a drink and saw you through the window.”  _Oh, good, cool, not stalkerish at all, Roman. Save it. Fix it now._  “I thought you were a robber.” 

_Nice._

But Virgil just gave a short laugh, nose crinkling up a little. Roman’s heart skipped a beat. “What, you think I’m gonna rob my own house or something?”

“I couldn’t see who you were at first!” 

“Well, here I am,” Virgil sighed, spreading his arms in a vaguely  _tada_ gesture. “Not a robber, unfortunately; you can go back and get your beauty sleep, Prince Smarming.” With that, he shoved his hands into his pockets once more and turned on his heel, and returned to kicking that poor pebble down the sidewalk. 

But Roman didn’t move. He just frowned, eyebrows knit together as he watched Virgil shift oh-so-slowly across the cement, shoulders hunched in on himself. Roman picked out the shake in the anxious side’s voice moments ago. 

“Are you alright?” he called; Virgil paused. 

“Yeah.” 

“…are you sure?”

“Yes.” Virgil turned for a second - only a second - to cast a curious glance at the prince, still hovering by the door on the porch, but Roman could see an inherent lack of eyeshadow and the rather prominent presence of dark circles under the other Side’s eyes. “Go back inside, Princey. I’m chill.”

“Virgil, if something’s wrong-” 

“I just had a nightmare.” His voice was cold again, wavering at the end with what Roman could only assume was a memory forcing its way into the anxious side’s mind. “I’m sorry for bothering you, Roman, but it’s good now.”

“Oh.” The silence around him is no longer flickering or buzzing. It was forceful now, pressing on his throat; he didn’t like this silence, the need to say something and make it better, comfort or advice or whatnot - Patton and his fatherly habits were far more suited for it all - but Roman could never just push past the tightening in his chest when that quiet overtook him. “Where are you going?”

Virgil’s heavy sigh only made the tightening worse. “I don’t know.”

“Oh.”

Quiet. Again. 

“Are you just gonna stand there all night, or do you need an invitation to get back in the house-”

“Do you want to see some stars?”

The snark painted on Virgil’s face melted away in an instant as he blinked at the creative side, eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

“Stars,” Roman repeated lamely. “I couldn’t sleep earlier- well, right now, I guess, and I have these lights- they’re relaxing- usually, I mean, but that’s a different story, ‘cause I couldn’t sleep because I don’t have ideas and whatnot- but they’re nice! The lights, of course, not my ideas that I don’t have, but…” He stopped, took a breath and squeezed his eyes shut to gather his thoughts. Stupid, rambley, hopeless romantic. Maybe he should just embrace his clock’s prophecy and commit to the image of a very, very sad raccoon. He’d embarrass himself less.

“Sure.”

“What?”

“Sure,” Virgil said again, ambling to the porch, hands still tucked into his patched-up pockets, “stars sound nice, even if I barely understood anything you just said.” He leveled his gaze at the slightly shell-shocked prince, a smirk hinting at his lips despite the exhaustion in his eyes. “Cute, but ridiculous.” He nodded at the door. “Lead the way, star boy.”

Roman managed to give a trademark offended scoff at the nickname, elbowing past the anxious side, though the gesture was devoid of any malice. They made their way back through the living room and up the stairs, shuffling down the hallway with feather-light footsteps until they reached the cherry wood door to Roman’s room. The lights were off - as Roman had left them - and he got the admittedly satisfying honor of flicking the lightswitch up, eyes trained on Virgil for his reaction.

The anxious side’s plain frown flickered away as the stars around Roman’s room twinkled into luminescence, his eyes widening the slightest bit as he took it in. Their warm glow added a golden hue to Virgil’s pale skin, lighting his freckles like a constellation in themselves, and his eyes, so dark that his irises were hardly distinguishable from his pupils, lit up brilliantly with the fairy lights’ reflection, which shifted gently as his gaze fluttered around the room. 

“You like them?” Roman asked hopefully. 

Virgil looked at him with those sparkly eyes, eyebrows raised. “Yeah- did you make these?”

“Well, I conjured them, so I suppose, yes.”

“Huh,” Virgil breathed, turning his attention back to the lights, a crooked smile pulling at his lips. “You should add some to my room sometime.” 

Roman let his gaze linger on the anxious side’s face a second longer before considering the lights himself. “I could do that.” 

(What Roman didn’t see - and how could he, as he had already looked away and was not an omniscient narrator, which were natural in fairy tales, which he was not in; but every story had one somewhere, and this happened to be the place where said narrator decided to cut in - was that Virgil was mesmerized by both the lights and a certain prince beneath them, with his easy, content smile and adorably stupid pajamas, and as Roman looked away, the anxious side took the opportunity to let his gaze linger, too.)

They fell silent again. Roman noticed, with an easy sigh, that the lights no longer flickered, there was no buzz in the air, and he could breathe fine in this quiet. No, this quiet was soft, warm, golden; this quiet was comfortable. 

…Just as comfortable as the bean bags he summoned immediately thereafter, which he and Virgil collapsed quite ceremoniously into, and they let the silence and the gentle twinkle of lights soothe the tension from their shoulders and the unwanted memories from their minds - it might have been a temporary solution, but it was a solution nonetheless.

And Roman found he was content with his slice of the stars once more.


End file.
